Jammu and Kashmir is also referred to as Kashmir in short.
It consists of the Kashmir Valley (15,948 sq.kms= 6158 sq. mile), Jammu (26,293 sq.kms) and Ladakh(59,146 sq.kms) under Indian control; "Azad" Kashmir (13,297 sq.kms) and Northern Territories (64,817 sq.kms) under Pakistani control; Aksai Chin, Demochok(37,555 sq.kms) and Shaksgam(5,180 sq.kms) under Chinese control, at present.
In the post-1949 ceasefire context, J&K(or Kashmir) is used to refer to the Indian held territory, unless specified otherwise. According to 2001 census, the Kashmir Valley has a population of 5.44 million with more than 95% Muslim majority; Jammu and Ladakh are predominantly Hindu and Buddhist respectively; the total population of Indian and Pakistan controlled J&K is 10 million (with 64% Muslim majority) and 4.13 million (with 100% Muslim majority) respectively. The term 'Kashmiris' has been used to denote the people of Kashmir or Kashmir Valley depending on the context.
Map of Jammu and Kashmir, Courtesy: Wikipedia.
Jammu-Kashmir.com, Facts and Figures[Alternate Link Cached]2001 Census of J&KClick here for website on History and Timeline of Kashmir Conflict

but as a practical matter, they were encouraged to accede to the
geographically contiguous Dominion, taking into account the wishes of
their people and in cases where a dispute arose, it was decided to settle
the question of accession by a plebiscite, a scheme proposed and accepted
by India.

Selected Works
of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Vol. 4, New
Delhi 1986, p.288a

Cable to C.R. Attlee from Nehru : New Delhi, 28
October 1947.

12. We are always ready to discuss any issue in dispute with representatives
of Pakistan. We
have laid down the principle that accession of every State, whether Junagadh or Kashmir or Hyderabad, should depend on
ascertained wishes of the people concerned.

Govt. of India,
White Paper on Jammu & Kashmir ,Delhi
1948, p.77.

Telegram, dated the 31st
December 1947, from Foreign, New Delhi,
to Indembassy, Washington:

[On 26 October, 1947]
In order to avoid any possible suggestion that India had taken advantage of
the State's immediate peril for her own political advantage, the Dominion
Government made it clear that, once the soil of the State had been cleared
of the invader and normal conditions restored, its people would be free
to decide their future by the recognised democratic
method of a plebiscite or referendum, which, in order to ensure complete
impartiality, might be held under international auspices.

Govt. of India,
White Paper on Jammu & Kashmir ,Delhi
1948, p.3.

Nevertheless, in accepting the accession, the Government of India made it
clear that they would regard it as purely provisional until such time as
the will of the people of the State could be ascertained.

Govt. of India,
White Paper on Jammu & Kashmir ,Delhi
1948, p.46.

Telegram, dated the 25th October 1947, from Foreign, New
Delhi, to C.R. Attlee, Prime Minister of UK.

From Prime Minister of India.

[….]

"I should like to make it clear that [the] question of aiding Kashmir
in this emergency is not designed in any way to influence the State to accede
to India. Our
view, which we have repeatedly made public is that
[the] question of accession in any disputed territory or State must be
decided in accordance with the wishes of the people and we adhere to this view".

Govt. of India,
White Paper on Jammu & Kashmir ,Delhi
1948, p.55.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime
Minister, in a broadcast from New Delhi
on November 2nd said:

"We have declared that the fate of Kashmir
is ultimately to be decided by the people. That pledge we have given, and the
Maharaja has supported it, not only to the people of Kashmir
but to the world. We will not, and cannot back out of it. We are prepared when
peace and law and order have been established to have a referendum held under
international auspices like the United Nations. We want it to be a fair and
just reference to the people, and we shall accept their verdict. I can imagine
no fairer and juster offer."

There was nothing very new about the idea of the plebiscite
as a means of solving Subcontinental problems. As we
have seen, it surfaced during the actual process of Partition prior to the
Transfer of Power in August. In September, it had been actively considered in
the context of Junagadh, a State with a Hindu
majority population whose Muslim Ruler had at the very
last moment of the British Raj decided to accede to Pakistan.
As a solution to the Junagadh issue, Jawaharlal Nehru
had made the following proposal to the Defence
Committee of the Indian Cabinet on 30
September 1947:

"we are entirely opposed to
war and wish to avoid it. We want an amicable settlement of this[Junagadh] issue and we propose therefore, that wherever
there is a dispute in regard to any territory, the matter should be decided by
a referendum or plebiscite of the people concerned. We shall accept the result
of this referendum whatever it may be as it is our desire that a decision
should be made in accordance with the wishes of the people concerned. We invite
the Pakistan Government, therefore, to submit the Junagadh
issue to a referendum of the people of Junagadh under
impartial auspices."

As in Junagadh so quite logically
in the mirror image situation of the State of Jammu & Kashmir, an argument
of which it is certain both Mountbatten and Nehru
were aware.

Official Records of the United Nations Security Council, Meeting No:534, 6 March
1951, pp.3-4:

Quotes from PanditPremNathBazaz published in a
pamphlet "The Truth About Kashmir":

Restlessness was universal. In Punch, where thousands of demobilized Muslim
veterans live, an open armed rebellion broke out against the Maharaja and his
administration. The rebellion spread rapidly to the adjoining area of Mirpur, where was veterans also lived in large numbers.
Instead of realizing what he had done, the Maharaja egged on by Congress
leaders and his new counsellors, dispatched the whole
of the Dogra Army to quell the disturbances, or as
one colonel put it, to reconquer the area. The army
perpetrated unheard of atrocities on the people of Punch. Whole villages were
burned down and innocent people were massacred. Reports reaching Srinagar were not allowed to be
published in the Press. No official reports were issued to allay the fears of
the public. This happened in September and the tribesmen did not enter the
State before 23 October 1947.

Official Records of the United Nations Security Council, Meeting No:234, 1948, pp.250-1:

Telegram received by the Governor-General of Pakistan
from the Muslim Conference, Kashmir on 20 September 1947:

"Atrocious military oppression in Poonch.Public being looted and shot in random. Kindly
intervene."

Telegram received by the Governor-General of Pakistan from the Muslims of BaghMallat, PoonchState,
dated 29 September 1947:

"Fire opened by the Kashmir Government since 9th and 10th
of Bhadon[around
middle of September]. Our Muslim public loss estimated at 500 lives. Kindly
intervene immediately."

Report from the Deputy Commissioner of the Rawalpindi
District to the Commissioner, Rawalpindi Division,
dated 8 October 1947:

"On my way back from Srinagar
on 8 October 1947, I came
across a large number of women and children crossing over from the Poonch side. They related stories of inhuman treatment and
terrible atrocities on the part of the Dogra troops
operating in the Poonch area…"

Sheikh Abdullah quoted in Official Records of the
United Nations Security Council, 1948, Meeting No:226
p.68:

A report of Sheikh Abdullah's statement made on 21 October,
in New Delhi,:
"The people of Poonch who suffered under the
local ruler and again under the Kashmir Maharaja, the overlord of the Poonch Ruler, had started a people's movement for the
redress of their grievances. It was not communal. KashmirState sent its troops, and there
was panic in Poonch. But most of the adult population of poonch, he explained, were
ex-servicemen in the Indian Army with close connexions
with the people in Jhelum and Rawalpindi-these are places in West
Paktsan. They evacuated their women and
children, crossed the frontier, and returned with arms supplied to them by
willing people..."

Alastair Lamb, Incomplete Partition,
Roxford 1997, p.121

The fiscal situation in Poonch at this moment was
observed by Richard Symonds, a Quaker who was
carrying out relief work in the Punjab. One of the very
few outsiders with first-hand knowledge of what was going on in Poonch, he wrote in the Calcutta Statesman(4 February 1948) that the
ex-servicemen returning to the Jagir found
"there was a tax on every hearth and every window. Every cow, buffalo and
sheep was taxed and even every wife. Finally the Zaildari
tax was introduced to pay for the cost of taxation, and Dogra
[Hindu] troops were billeted on the [Muslim] Poonchis
to enforce collection." These taxes were not, it
should be noted, imposed on Hindus or Sikhs.

The first clear sign of the Poonch revolt was the
refusal by many villages and landlords dotted over the region to pay these new,
and unaccustomed, taxes to the Maharaja's agents.

Alastair Lamb, Incomplete Partition,
Roxford 1997, p.123

The various Azad Kashmiri stories of the origins
of the Poonch revolt tend, naturally enough, towards
the romantic, and they may well conceal events which have not been recorded and
which involve unknown persons. What is undoubtedly true, however, is that in
the last week of August a condition of unrest and spasmodic violence in Poonch had turned into an organised
opposition to the Dogra Dynasty the like of which had
not been seen since the revolt of Shams-ud-Din in the
1830s. Sir Hari Singh lacked the power, though
probably he did not lack the wish, to treat the rebels as had his
great-grandfather in that firm manner which, we have seen, so amazed G.T. Vigne. Thus the rebellion grew in strength as more and more
ex-soldiers rallied to the cause, either bringing their weapons with them or
capturing rifles from the State forces.

With all this the sources on the official Jammu
& KashmirState
side do not disagree. By the second week of September the Maharaja's position
in Poonch and Mirpur, at
least in the countryside as the towns were still secure enough, was extremely
precarious. It is recorded that by 13 September no fewer than 60,000 Hindu
refugees had passed from the Poonch-Mirpur area
towards Jammu and about half the
total Hindu and Sikh population had fled the areas of disturbance.

It is undeniable that later in October there was communal
violence all along the Pakistan-Kashmir border, from Kathua
to Bhimber to Mirpur, and
beyond. It is also undeniable that KashmirState forces did cross over the
border into Pakistan
proper on several occasions, and on one occasion penetrated six miles deep to
virtually depopulate two [Muslim] villages near Sialkot. [Footnote:] This was not
merely a Pakistan
concoction, but attested to by a British officer who went to the site. The
alleged body count of over 17,000 corpses may be what he was told-it is
unlikely that he personally did the counting, but the fact of casualties in the
thousands is beyond reasonable doubt, if the British officer's report to the UK
Deputy High Commission in Lahore was accurate. Telegram from UKDy. High Commissioner in Lahore,
6 Nov. 1947.

Ian Stephens, Pakistan, New York 1963, p.200

But in the JammuProvince,
things went very differently. There, unlike every other part of the State,
Hindus and Sikhs slightly outnumbered Muslims; and within a period of eleven
weeks starting in August, systematic savageries, similar to those already
launched in East Punjab and in Patiala and Kapurthala,
practically eliminated the entire Muslim element in the population, amounting
to 500,000 people. About 200,000 just disappeared, remaining untraceable,
having presumably been butchered, or died from epidemics or exposure. The rest
fled destitute to West Punjab….This writer talked about it early in the
following month with Mr. Gandhi, deducing that, even more than the carnage in
and around Delhi itself, it explained the despairing mood of that great teacher
of ahimsa during his last few weeks of life.

A few
excerpts from the Official Records

Official Records of the United Nations Security Council, Meeting No:234, 1948, pp.249-250:

Special Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph of London,
Douglas Brown, in the issue of 12
January 1948:

"Yet another element in the situation is provided by Sikh refugees from
the West Punjab who have seized Muslim lands in Jammu….
They originated the massacres there last October, to clear for themselves new
Sikh territory to comensate for their losses in Pakistan
and to provide part of the nucleus of a future Sikhistan.
"

Official Records of the United Nations Security Council, Meeting No:534, 6 March
1951, pp.3-4:

Shortly after the terrible slaughters in India, which accompanied partition,
the Maharaja set upon a course of action whereby, in the words of the special
correspondent of The Times of London published in its issue of 10
October 1948,"in the remaining Dogra area,
237,000 Muslims were systematically exterminated, unless they escaped to
Pakistan along the border, by all the forces of the Dogra
State headed by the Maharaja in person and aided by Hindus and Sikhs."

Official Records of the United Nations Security Council, Meeting No:226, 1948, pp.71-2:

Mr. G.K. Reddy, a Hindu editor of Kashmir Times, in a statement
published in the Daily Gazette ,a Hindu paper of Karachi,
in its issue of 28 October:

"The mad orgy of Dogra violence against
unarmed Muslims should put any self-respecting human being to shame. I saw
armed bands of ruffians and soldiers shooting down and hacking to pieces
helpless Muslim refugees heading towards Pakistan…I
saw en route State officials freely distributing arms and ammunition among the Dogras… From the hotel room where I was detained in Jammu,
I counted as many as twenty-six villages burning one night and all through the
night rattling fire of automatic weapons could be heard from the surrounding
refugee camps."

Official Records of the United Nations Security Council, Meeting No:234, 1948, pp.252-3:

Telegram sent from Sialkot,
dated 20 October, from the President of the District Muslim Conference, Jammu
to the Minister at Karachi:

"Dogra military reinforced by numberless
Indian Army plain-clothers, Sikh jathas,
local and from abroad. Hindus and Rajputs,
armed with modern weapons, launched wholesale massacre of Muslims of Ranbirsinghpura, Akhnur, Samba
and Jammu Tehsils of Jammu District. Several thousand
Muslims already ruthlessly butchered. Hundreds of women abducted. All moveable
property looted and hundreds of Muslim villages burnt to ashes. Hostile forces, continuing killing suburban Muslims and burning
Muslim villages from all sides, now converging on JammuCity and
only one mile distant from it. Village Raipur, within Jammu Cantonment
area, burnt. Muslims in City already hopeless minority and
altogether unarmed. Fifteen thousand Muslims of Jammu City including
women, children and cream of Muslim intelligentsia surrounded from all sides,
helpless and in immediate danger of being ruthlessly killed. Muslim military
disarmed and brigadier KhodaBux,
Jammu Cantonment relieved by Hindu Brigadier. If immediate help not made, all
would be butchered. …."

Telegram sent from Sialkot,
dated 22 October, from the City Muslim Conference, Jammu
to the Governor-General at Karachi:

There was indeed a civil war raging in Poonch. In Jammu
at that very moment the Maharaja was engaged in a series of massacres of
Muslims which some observers have considered to have been the nastiest of all
in the wave of atrocities which followed immediately upon the Transfer of Power:
conservative estimates suggest over 200,000 deaths here between August and
December 1947. These events, naturally enough, set hordes of
refugees on the move into Pakistan.

Alastair Lamb, Incomplete Partition,
Roxford 1997, p.128

There is evidence that from the outset regular troops and police in the
State service joined informally and covertly, but enthusiastically, in these
atrocities which, some have estimated, eventually resulted in the death of atleast 200,000 Muslims and drove twice as many into exile.

By the beginning of October the Jammu &
KashmirState
authorities joined openly in this anti-Muslim policy by setting out to create
along the State's border with Pakistan
(in the region of Gujarat and Sialkot) a depopulated zone some
three miles deep. Hindus here were evacuated. Muslims were either killed or
driven across into Pakistan.
On a number of occasions Jammu & Kashmir State Forces actually crossed over
into Pakistan
and destroyed villages there(well documented acts of Jammu
& KashmirState's
"aggression" on its territory which Pakistan
has signally failed to exploit in its arguments concerning the rights and
wrongs of the Kashmir situation). Early in October
British observers saw in one such village on the Pakistan
side of the border no fewer than 1,700 corpses of slaughtered Muslim men, women
and children. Before 22 October, a crucial date on the Kashmir
story, the Pakistan
authorities reported that at least 100,000 Muslim refugees from Jammu
were being cared for in the neighbourhood of Sialkot. The Government in Karachi
might talk about negotiations, but there was a growing body of opinion in Pakistan,
particularly in the Punjab, which argued forcefully for
more direct action to stop the killing.

In Jammu District alone, which is a part of the larger JammuProvince, Muslims numbered 158,630 and comprised 37% of the total
population of 428,719 in the year 1941. In the year 1961, Muslims numbered only
51,693 and comprised only 10% of the total population of 516,932. The decrease
in the number of Muslims in Jammu
district alone was over 100,000.

P.S.Verma, Jammu
and Kashmir at the political crossroads,
New Delhi 1994, p.34

The holocaust which raged through certain states like Bengal
and Punjab in 1947 "failed to have any echo"
in the KashmirValley
which had as many as 93.7 per cent Muslim population. The Hindus in the KashmirValley remained safe and protected
even in the wake of communal killings of Muslims in the Hindus dominated Jammu
region. Credit for this mainly goes to Sheikh Abdullah and his colleagues in
the party.

BalrajPuri, Jammu and Kashmir: Triumph and Tragedy of Indian federalisation, New Delhi 1981, pp.53-7

p.53: The Muslim Conference also changed its stand.
In a resolution passed at a convention in Srinagar on
19 July 1947, under the Presidentship of Hamidullah Khan, the Conference respectfully and fervently
"appealed to the Maharaja Bahadur to declare
internal autonomy of the State as soon as possible and himself assuming the
position of a constitutional monarch, establish a constituent assembly and
simultaneously accede to the Dominion of Pakistan in the matter relating to defence, communication and external affairs."

p.56:In
response to pressure from India
and to neutralise aggressive postures of pro-Pakistan
Muslim Conference, the Maharaja released Sheikh Abdullah on 29 September. [This
is corroborated by the website of the Indian
Embassy: ]

p.57:In
a public speech on October 9, he[Sheikh Abdullah] said: "Accession is of
little importance. Freedom is more important. We do not want to join either
dominion as slaves. I warn the Government of India and Pakistan
that if Maharaja decides to join either of them without our consent, we shall
rise in revolt against such a decision."

PremNathBazaz quoted in Official Records of the United
Nations Security Council, 1951, Meeting No:534
p.6:

Quoted from PremNathBazaz published in a
pamphlet "The Truth about Kashmir":
"Sheikh Abdullah was then in gaol as a result if
his unsuccessful 'Quit Kashmir' adventure. The trend of public opinion outside
made him worried and restless. He wrote a letter to a friend in Jammu,
which was published in the Congress press, praying to the Maharaja that he
should neither remain independent nor join Pakistan,
but should declare the State's accession to India
forthwith. Sheikh Abdullah offered the unequivocal support of his National
Conference to such a declaration."

Sheikh Abdullah quoted in Official Records of the
United Nations Security Council, 1948, Meeting No:226
pp.68-9:

Again in the Statesman of 22 October, a speech by
Sheikh Abdullah is reported as follows:"Speaking
at a reception today, Sheikh Abdullah, the Kashmiri Nationalist leader, pleaded
for time to consider which dominion the State should join.....Muslims on the
other hand, had learned of the fate of Muslims in Kapurthala,
where, despite their majority, they had been wiped out...The same fate had been
meted out to them in Alwar, Bharatpur,
and Kapurthala, where the Muslim population had
either been killed or expelled, but obviously the fear was that the same thing
might be enacted in Kashmir."

A few months later[after October 1947] I was assured by a
man in authority in Peshawar that the corpses of Muslims killed by the Dogras had been paraded through the Peshawar streets by men
who called on the people to support a "jehad"-
"a holy war"- against the infidels in power in Kashmir and in India.
A few days later thousands of tribesmen, with arms which must have been
supplied to them by someone in Pakistan,
poured through Peshawar and up the Jhelum valley into the lower part of the vale
of Kashmir.

Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, New York 2000,
p.60.

PremNathBazaz, a Kashmiri Pandit
disillusioned with Sheikh Abdullah and still opposed to the autocracy of the
maharaja, believed the motives of the tribesmen should be considered. 'They
wanted to liberate Kashmir from the tyranny of the
Maharaja and nationalist renegades. And we should not forget that some members
of the Indian army did no less of looting and molesting(in
repelling the invaders).'[PremNathBazaz, Azad
Kashmir, Lahore, p.33.]

Involvement
of Government of Pakistan
in Pathan Incursion:

Alastair Lamb,
Incomplete Partition, Roxford 1997, pp.136-137

There remains one major question to answer. What part had
the Government of Pakistan to play in this military venture into the state of Jammu
and Kashmir? In a formal sense the Government as such
took no part at all. The Governor-General, M.A.Jinnah,
was kept ignorant of all details, though naturally he was aware that there was
trouble of some sort brewing in Kashmir; and the
Pakistan Cabinet took no minuted stance on this
matter. There can be no doubt, however, that various individuals in Pakistan,
both official and unofficial, did show an extremely active interest in what was
afoot. We can probably divide these persons into three main categories.

First: there were those who had supported from atleast 12 September the formation of the Azad Kashmir Government. Some were indeed of great
seniority in Pakistan
administration, including the Prime Minister Liaquat
Ali Khan. Their concern was not the day-to-day conduct of operations but rather
the underlying necessity of keeping the Azad Kashmir
movement afloat. In terms of organising supplies for Azad Kashmir the record suggests that these men achieved
very little; their activity was largely symbolic.

Second: in the North-West Frontier Province
and in the Rawalpindi District of the Punjab
there were many officials both appointed and elected, from the Chief Minister
of the North-West Frontier province
downwards, who were aware of the growing connection between the tribal world of
the North-West Frontier and Azad Kashmir. It cannot
be denied that such men did very little indeed to discourage this relationship.
Some of them went out of their way to promote it.

Third: there were many individual soldiers in the Pakistan
Army who appreciated the importance of the Azad
Kashmir movement and felt it their duty to help it. A number of regulars took
leave, or became technically "deserters", to join the fray; but in
most cases this was later in the story. A few, like Colonel Akbar
Khan, took it upon themselves to assume senior staff responsibilities with the Azad Kashmiri forces. Subsequently, Akbar
Khan under the pseudonym "General Tariq"
was to take active command in the field, but not during the events under
consideration here. Some Pakistani officers merely turned a blind eye when
boxes of .303 ammunition mysteriously disappeared from
the armouries; but again, such actions were to become
more important later on. It is safe to say that there was very little regular
Pakistan Army presence, direct or indirect, in Major KhurshidAnwar's column on the road to Uri between 22 and 24 October 1947.

Selected Works
of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Vol. 4, New
Delhi 1986, p.288a

Cable to C.R. Attlee from Nehru : New Delhi, 28
October 1947.

12. We are always ready to discuss any issue in dispute with representatives
of Pakistan. We
have laid down the principle that accession of every State, whether Junagadh or Kashmir or Hyderabad, should depend on
ascertained wishes of the people concerned.

Govt. of India,
White Paper on Jammu & Kashmir ,Delhi
1948, p.77.

Telegram, dated the 31st
December 1947, from Foreign, New Delhi,
to Indembassy, Washington:

[On 26 October, 1947]
In order to avoid any possible suggestion that India had taken advantage of
the State's immediate peril for her own political advantage, the Dominion
Government made it clear that, once the soil of the State had been cleared
of the invader and normal conditions restored, its people would be free
to decide their future by the recognised democratic
method of a plebiscite or referendum, which, in order to ensure complete
impartiality, might be held under international auspices.

Govt. of India,
White Paper on Jammu & Kashmir ,Delhi
1948, p.3.

Nevertheless, in accepting the accession, the Government of India made it
clear that they would regard it as purely provisional until such time as
the will of the people of the State could be ascertained.

Govt. of India,
White Paper on Jammu & Kashmir ,Delhi
1948, p.46.

Telegram, dated the 25th October 1947, from Foreign, New
Delhi, to C.R. Attlee, Prime Minister of UK.

From Prime Minister of India.

[….]

"I should like to make it clear that [the] question of aiding Kashmir
in this emergency is not designed in any way to influence the State to accede
to India. Our
view, which we have repeatedly made public is that
[the] question of accession in any disputed territory or State must be
decided in accordance with the wishes of the people and we adhere to this view".

Govt. of India,
White Paper on Jammu & Kashmir ,Delhi
1948, p.55.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime
Minister, in a broadcast from New Delhi
on November 2nd said:

"We have declared that the fate of Kashmir
is ultimately to be decided by the people. That pledge we have given, and the
Maharaja has supported it, not only to the people of Kashmir
but to the world. We will not, and cannot back out of it. We are prepared when
peace and law and order have been established to have a referendum held under
international auspices like the United Nations. We want it to be a fair and
just reference to the people, and we shall accept their verdict. I can imagine
no fairer and juster offer."

Sheikh
Abdullah, Flames of the Chinar, New
Delhi 1993, p.97

While MehrChandMahajan was to continue as Prime Minister, I [Sheikh
Abdullah] was appointed Director-General, Administration [on 27 October, 1947]- the first Kashmiri Muslim to hold this post. In my new
position I addressed the senior officials of the government, and categorically
stated that the future of Kashmir would be decided only
by the Kashmiris. Our decision to accede to India
was ad hoc, and would ultimately decided by a
plebiscite.

Alastair Lamb,
Incomplete Partition, Roxford 1997, p.185

Left behind in Baramula [on 27 and
28 October] were assorted groups of [Pathan]
tribesmen from the North-West Frontier Province and, even, it is very possible,
Afghanistan. Discipline was not the strongest characteristic of such men; and
their officers experienced serious difficulty in keeping them under control,
particularly when stories began to circulate of the arrival of the Sikhs (who
had been generally accepted by the tribesmen as the greatest scourge of the
Muslims in the communal massacres which accompanied Partition, and the
legitimate foe in any jihad, holy war) at Srinagar
airfield. The inevitable killing of Sikhs and Hindus in Baramula,
particularly merchants who had remained to guard their stock, now began to be
accompanied by indiscriminate looting and a considerable amount of rape,
applied as much to unfortunate Kashmiri Muslims as to the infidel. Usually
these outrages did not lead to massacre; but in a few cases, where leaders
completely lost control over their men, an orgy of killing was the result. This
was certainly the case at St. Joseph's
College, Convent and Hospital, the site of what was to become one of the most publicised incidents of the entire Kashmir
conflict. Here nuns, priests and congregation, including patients in the
hospital, were slaughtered; and at the same time a small number of Europeans,
notably Lt.-Colonel D.O. Dykes and his wife, as well as the Assistant Mother
Superior and one Mr. Barretto, met their deaths at
tribal hands.

Alastair Lamb,
Incomplete Partition, Roxford 1997, pp.186-187

The Indian side has maintained, largely on the evidence of
European and American press reports which date to several days after the Indian
reoccupation of Baramula on 8 November, that many
thousands of people were killed there by the tribesmen (notably the reports in
New York Times by Robert Trumbull ). The town was by
this time virtually deserted, the Muslim population having fled, initially to
avoid the attentions of tearaway tribesmen and then
in fear of the advancing Indian Army, which was seen to represent the return of
the Dogras and the vengeful wrath of Sir Hari Singh. The unfortunate Baramula
residents may also, to judge from photographs published by the Indians, have
suffered bombardment by Indian mortars, artillery and, it may be, aircraft -
there is no doubt that the Indian side made extensive use of air power in the
first phase of the Kashmir campaign: all this may well have reinforced the
reluctance of the Baramula folk to stay put. By
subtracting the number of those who remained in Baramula
when the Indians arrived, or who turned up shortly after, from the pre-crisis
population of some 15,000 or so, casualty figures of up to 13,000 have been
calculated....[Alastair
Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, Roxford 1991,
p.143: In fact, of course, it is meant no more than that the majority of the
town's people had gone away, as one would expect in the circumstances. If one
applied the refugee/killed ratio of Partition to Trumbull's
Baramula statistics, one would come up with somewhere
in the order of 400 killed, a not unreasonable figure in the light of other
sources.]

The Baramula affair has become
central to the Indian mythology about Kashmir. The
intervention of 27 October 1947, be it legal or not, with or without the
Instrument of Accession, has been justified by the fact that this horror was in
progress; and only through Indian action could it have been prevented from
spreading to Srinagar itself. To this claim one can
offer three points in reply.

First: as we have already suggested, it may well be that the
very fact of the Indian intervention on 27 October actually guaranteed in reaction
that some kind of cataclysm should take place on the part of the extremely
unsophisticated tribesmen. There seems to be little doubt that the Baramula affair followed the Indian arrival at Srinagar airfield.

Second: whatever happened in Baramula
that day is as nothing when compared to what has happened to Kashmiri men,
women and children, at Indian hands since 1989. Those massacres which it is
argued did not take place on 27 October and the days which immediately followed
were not prevented; they were merely postponed for two generations, with the
Indians now the vandals.

Finally: even in the first days of the Indian intervention
the troops on the Indian side were not always particularly gentle with the
civilian populations they encountered. The available records contain evidence
of a number of atrocities perpetrated by the Indian military on the Kashmiris they had ostensibly come to the rescue which must
have quite soon gone far to counter-balance whatever the Pathan
tribesmen may have done at Baramula.

Explaining on June 1948, why he induced the National
Conference to accept the State's accession to India,
Abdullah said:"We the people of Jammu
and Kashmir, have thrown our lot with Indian people
not in the heat of passion or a moment of despair, but by deliberate choice...".

Josef
Korbel, Danger in Kashmir, Princeton,
N.J. 1966, p.262

Sheikh Abdullah's press interview quoted in The Hindu, March 26,1952:

"we are going to exercise this
right[to decide the future of Kashmir] to the fullest
measure and at the earliest opportunity....[should the kashmiri
people not ratify the accession to India,]
it would regain the status which it enjoyed immediately preceding the
accession[i.e., independence]. "

BalrajPuri, Kashmir:
Towards Insurgency, New
Delhi 1993, p.28.

A few excerpts:

Sheikh Abdullah in a speech at Ranbir
Singh Pura in Jammu
on 10 April 1952:

"We have acceded to India
in regard to defence, foreign affairs and
communications. in order to ensure a sort of internal
autonomy... If our right to shape our destiny is challenged and if there is
resurgence of communalism in India,
how are we to convince the Muslims in Kashmir that India
does not intend to swallow us?"

From the start of the trouble, many Indian journalists and
politicians have insisted that the Kashmir uprising was
the work of Pakistan's
intelligence services. The dean of India's
defence specialists, K.Subramanyam,
in a lengthy monograph on the Kashmir dispute, cites the
existence of a secret Pakistani plan to start a Kashmiri uprising, code-named Op[Operation] Topac, that the late
General Zia-ul-Haq reportedly set in motion. This
plan, however, was later shown to be a fraud, concocted by Indian analysts as a
hypothetical exercise, a fact Subrahmanyam later
acknowledged.*

*Kargil
Review Committee Report, submitted in Indian Parliament on February 23, 2000 by a committee
under the Chairmanship of Sri K. Subrahmanyam, a defence studies expert:

One of the most realistic assessments of Kashmir
developments as they unfolded during Pakistan's
proxy war was "Operation TOPAC", a war game written by a team of
retired Indian Army Officers in 1989. It is interesting to note that
"Operation TOPAC" has since been mistakenly attributed even by high
placed Indian officials and agencies to Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

The years of armed struggle have taken a heavy toll of lives lost, about which reliable figures are impossible to obtain. According to official handouts 19,866 people have died in Jammu and Kashmir since January 1990, including 9,123 members of armed opposition groups, 6,673 victims of armed opposition groups, 2,477 civilians killed by Indian security forces and 1,593 security personnel.(20) A year earlier on 24 April 1997, Minister of State for Home Affairs, Ali Mohammad Sagar, told the Legislative Assembly that in the seven years of unrest, 16,991 persons, including 7,849 civilians, 1,319 security personnel and 7,823 "militants" including 121 foreign mercenaries, had been killed. He admitted that 454 persons were missing since 1990. The Institute of Kashmir Studies believes that the number of dead since 1989-1990 lies between 40,000 and 50,000.
Amnesty International Report, 1999Human Rights Watch Report, 1999[Alternate Link Cached]Click here for website on History and Timeline of Kashmir Conflict

The official estimate of Hindus and Sikhs killed between
January 1990 and October 1992 is 241.*The
official estimate of Hindus and Sikhs killed between 1997 and 2002 is less than
432. ** Obtaining an average of 85 killings per year and
extrapolating it to 1993-1996, the estimated Hindus and Sikhs killed between Januray 1990 and June 2002 is around 1000.

*BalrajPuri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency, New Delhi 1993,
p.69: The Times of India, 5 February 1992, reported, quoting official
sources, that militants killed 1585 men and women, including 981 Muslims, 218
Hindus, 23 Sikhs and 363 security personnel between January 1990 and October
1992.

"Every Muslim in Kashmir is a
militant today. All of them are for secession from India.
I am scuttling SrinagarDoordarshan'sprogrammes because every one there is a militant.....The
bullet is the only solution for Kashmir. Unless the
militants are fully wiped out, normalcy can't return to the Valley."

The Jagmohan regime witnessed the exodus of almost
the entire small but vital Kashmir Pandit community
from the valley. PadmaVibhushanInder Mohan (later he renounced the title) and I [BalrajPuri] were the first
public men to visit Kashmir in the second week of March
1990 after the new phase of repression had started. Though the Kashmiri Muslims
were in an angry mood, they heard us with respect and narrated their tales of
woe. At scores of the meetings to which we were invited during our short but
hectic visit, Kashmiri muslims
expressed a genuine feeling of regret over the migration of Kashmiri Pandits
(KP) and urged us to stop and reverse it. Encouraged by the popular mood, we
formed a joint committee of the two communities with the former chief justice
of the High Court Mufti BahauddinFarooqi
as president, the Kashmiri Pandit leader H.N.Jatto as vice-president and a leading advocate GhulamNabiHagroo
as general secretary, in order to allay the apprehensions of the Kashmiri
Pandits. Jatto recalled that the Pandits had reversed
their decision to migrate in 1986 after the success of the goodwill mission led
by me. He expressed the hope that my new initiative would meet with similar
success. A number of Muslim leaders and parties, including militant outfits,
also appealed to the Pandits not to leave their homes, Jatto
welcomed and endorsed their appeals, but soon migrated to Jammu
himself. He told me that soon after the joint committee was set up, the
Governor [Jagmohan] sent a DSP to him with an air
ticket for Jammu, a
jeep to take him to the airport, an offer of accomodation
at Jammu and an
advice to leave Kashmir immediately.
Obviously the Governor did not believe that the effort at restoring
inter-community understanding and confidence was worth a trial.

The experiment came under cross fire. The official attitude was far from
cooperative. The rise of new militant groups, some warnings in anonymous
posters and some unexplained killings of innocent members of the community
contributed to an atmosphere of insecurity for the Kashmiri Pandits. A
thorough, independent enquiry alone can show whether this exodus of Pandits,
the largest in their long history, was entirely unavoidable.

The 1981 Census in the KashmirValley
records 125,000 Hindus*. Taking the 30% increase in the total
population over the period 1971-1981 and extrapolating it to the period
1981-1990, we get an estimated total Hindu population of the Valley in 1990 as
162,500.